In 2001, a person was stabbed to dying close to a lakeside restaurant in Yekaterinburg, an city centre in Russia’s Ural Mountains area.
Along with his dying breath, he whispered the names of his alleged killers to the police, native media claimed.
The person and his presumed murderers had been ethnic Azeris, Turkic-speaking Muslims whose households fled to Russia within the Nineteen Nineties after the battle in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azeri area dominated by ethnic Armenians.
Nevertheless it took Russian authorities 24 years to determine and detain the presumed suspects – though they ran the restaurant and by no means went into hiding.
Two alleged suspects died whereas being rounded up on Friday. One suffered a “coronary heart assault” whereas the opposite suspect’s reason for dying “is being established”, in line with Russian prosecutors.
In addition they purported that the suspects had been a part of “a felony group” allegedly concerned in different murders and the sale of counterfeit alcohol that killed 44 folks in 2021.
The prosecutors offered no solutions as to why the presumed “criminals” had been at giant for thus lengthy – and didn’t elaborate on the apparently brutal method by which they had been detained.
The deaths triggered a diplomatic storm which will contribute to a tectonic shift within the strategic South Caucasus area, Russia’s former stamping floor, the place Azerbaijan received Nagorno-Karabakh again in 2020, and Turkiye is regaining its centuries-old clout.
Azerbaijan slams Russia’s ‘unacceptable violence’
The spat has to this point resulted within the arrest of two Russian intelligence officers in Azerbaijan, the shutdown of a Kremlin-funded media outlet there, and the cancellation of “cultural occasions” sponsored by Moscow.
Russian police and intelligence officers used “unacceptable violence” that killed two brothers, Ziyaddin Safarov and Gusein Safarov, and left their family members severely injured, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of International Affairs mentioned on Saturday.
One of many injured males reportedly mentioned masked officers started breaking his entrance door at daybreak, horrifying his youngsters.
The officers “turned the home the wrong way up and saved beating us for an hour with out asking something”, Mohammed Safarov advised the MediaAzNews web site.
He mentioned his aged father was additionally overwhelmed and electrocuted for hours and claimed they had been each requested to “volunteer” to battle Russia’s battle in Ukraine.
Different Azeri media shops printed images of bruises and wounds the boys claimed had been attributable to Russian officers.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov mentioned on Monday, in response to a query about Azerbaijan’s reactions, “We sincerely remorse such selections”.
He added, “We consider that all the things that’s occurring (in Yekaterinburg) is expounded to the work of regulation enforcement businesses, and this can’t and shouldn’t be a purpose for such a response.”
However Emil Mustafayev, a political analyst primarily based in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, mentioned the incident highlighted a xenophobic pressure in Russia.
“The killing of Azeris is a hyperlink within the chain of tendentious politics the place ethnic minorities are used as a lightning rod,” he mentioned. “This isn’t only a tragedy, it is a symptom of a deep illness of the Russian society.”
The Azeri diaspora in Russia is at the very least two million sturdy, however they face discrimination, police brutality and hate assaults.
“The Kremlin has way back mastered a trick – when home dissent is on the rise, there’s a want to modify consideration to ‘the enemies from inside’, be that Ukrainians, Tajiks, Uzbeks or, like now, Azeris,” Mustafayev added.
The Kremlin makes use of state propaganda, police brutality and the taciturn approval of prime officers to create an environment of violence towards migrants that’s “seen as regular, as inevitable”, he mentioned.
Again within the Nineteen Nineties, Azeri migrants practically monopolised fruit commerce and mini-bus transportation in Russian city centres.
Many nonetheless run numerous outlets promoting greens and flowers.
“We’re the boogeymen, cops at all times must test our paperwork and want no excuse to harass us and name us names even after they see my Russian passport,” an ethnic Azeri proprietor of a flower store close to a serious railway station in Moscow advised Al Jazeera, on situation of anonymity.
Till the early 2000s, the Azeris “undoubtedly had been the primary” most-hated ethnic minority in Russia, till the arrival of labour migrants from Russia’s North Caucasus and ex-Soviet Central Asia, mentioned Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen College.
Since then, some ultra-nationalists and skinheads who thought-about Azeris their fundamental enemies joined regulation enforcement businesses, he added.
“So, the cruelty in Yekaterinburg might have been attributable to” the decades-old hatred, Mitrokhin advised Al Jazeera.
Strained ties
Different geopolitical elements contributed to anti-Azeri sentiments in Russia.
In 2020, Azerbaijan put an end to the seemingly unsolvable political impasse over Nagorno-Karabakh.
“The success undoubtedly turned doable because of Turkiye’s navy help,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a suppose tank in London, advised Al Jazeera.
Baku purchased superior Turkish-made Bayraktar drones that would simply strike giant teams of Armenian and separatist troopers, along with their trenches, tanks and vans.
An Azeri-Turkish alliance emerged, “permitting Baku to do away with Moscow’s obtrusive ‘peacekeeping’ mission and depriving it of an opportunity to govern the Azeri-Armenian battle to maintain each [Azerbaijan and Armenia] in its political orbit”, he mentioned.
The alliance tarnished Moscow’s clout in South Caucasus, whereas Baku sympathised with Kyiv within the Russian-Ukrainian battle, he mentioned.
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev additionally accused Russia of obstructing an investigation into the downing of an Azeri passenger aircraft over Chechnya final December.
The aircraft was apparently hit by panicking Russian air defence forces throughout a Ukrainian drone assault on Grozny, Chechnya’s administrative capital.
Aliyev additionally refused to participate within the Might 9 parade on Moscow’s iconic Crimson Sq. to commemorate Russia’s position in defeating Nazi Germany in 1945.
Baku fiercely resists the Kremlin’s marketing campaign to forcibly enlist Azeri labour migrants to hitch Russia’s battle effort in Ukraine.
Ilkhamov mentioned the violent sting in Yekaterinburg turned a part of the Kremlin’s efforts to “frighten the Azeri neighborhood in Russia”.
